When Liv Osthus was in high school, she wanted to be the best at everything. She was a national merit scholar, a musician, a star athlete. So determined was she in her pursuit of excellence that, after reading a book on sports dieting, Osthus more or less stopped eating. The bouts of anorexia that followed nearly killed Osthus, but her struggle to overcome the disorder helped shape the rest of her life. “This drive for society’s view of success ended up biting me in the ass and that was very instructive. After that, I decided that success has to resonate from within.”

Two decades later, Osthus is a writer, an activist, and a musician. She has survived cancer, published two books, and released four albums. But her true passion, her mainstay profession is rare for Williams alums. For nearly twenty years, Osthus has worked as a stripper.

For many, the fact that a Williams alum would choose to work as a stripper is unfathomable. Society tells us that sex work is bad – that if a run of bad luck forced a college graduate to strip in order to pay the bills, it would be a short-term arrangement – something only discussed in hushed voices. Who would choose sex work? Who would turn down opportunities to write for The New York Times to perform nude at a local bar?

“Sex work is the one thing that intellectuals refuse to talk about. They think about race. They think about class, the economy, the environment. But they don’t want to think about why we unequivocally say that all sex work is bad.”

But to Osthus, stripping is not dirty or degrading – it’s not about sex or even physical beauty. To her, stripping is about performance. “Whenever I go to a strip club, I see art. What [the dancers] present on stage makes me reflect on my life, and that’s what great art does.”

I often say that it’s because of Williams that I became a stripper because I was so frustrated with the climate there regarding class partly and at the way my peers looked at sex work. I was the shyest person ever. I didn’t wear a swimsuit between age ten and age 20.

I was an anthropology major and took some sociology classes senior year. There was a class called body, self, and culture and one called sex, gender, and sexuality, and we looked at prostitutes in East Africa. I studied in Tanzania my junior year so I’d been to East Africa and am very fond of it. It opened my eyes to the idea that the second poorest nation in the world seemed to have wealth in ways that we didn’t. The professor brought up the idea through the books we were reading that prostitution could be liberating for women especially in these really strident male dominated cultures. In some of these places where men have forty wives, some of the wives would escape and go to brothels in the cities. While they were there, they could work, earn money, and get an education. Money is power, so by making money they could earn their independence from a tribal society where you couldn’t do anything other than be one of forty wives. That blew my mind – you could use your body through sex work to achieve independence. It’s not how we look at it in our culture, and it certainly didn’t agree with the women’s studies majors who said that sex work was unequivocally bad. But men use their bodies in all sorts of labor intensive jobs. Are women to precious to use their bodies? I felt like it was anti-feminist to say that a women couldn’t use her body for sex work when obviously it made dollars and cents sense.

My best friends and I went down to New Orleans for spring break senior year, and I went to my first strip club. I had training in acting and dance, and the dancer was mesmerizing. There were couples in the audience, it wasn’t just dudes, it was a dance performance. Afterwards, she came down and talked to us and broke down that fourth wall, and we got to know about her as a rounded person. I found the whole thing fascinating. There’s a sociological thing happening, there’s economics, there’s feminism. It seemed to take all of my interests including performing and put it in one career.

In the corner of the crowded bar, Bass took a deep breath and pushed his way to the stage. On the surface, this was an ordinary event—a midweek open mic night at the Peppermint Lounge, an upscale bar a few miles west of New York City. The audience was an eclectic mix—bankers and artists, businessmen and wanderers. They were here for a few drinks and a few laughs—no one was looking for the next Jimi Hendrix.

To Bass, however, this was much more than a one-song show for a few dozen strangers. This was his proving ground. Either he had what it took to make it as a professional singer or he didn’t. “I figured that a crowd like that, once they had a lot of alcohol, would be brutally honest. The experiment was to get up and see if I could win over the crowd with something they wanted to hear, and then win them over with a gospel song.” Gospel music, after all, was Bass’s true passion.

Bass got up, sang his song, and left the club. He lived over the river in New Jersey and had to be at work early the next morning. “When I went back to the bar the next week, the owners said they had been looking for me because I had won the open mic night, and they needed to give me my prize. After that, I decided I was ready to find a [singing] group.”

When Eric Kang was in middle school, his music teacher told him that if he could imagine himself doing anything besides music, he should do that. Kang took the advice and entered Williams prepared to become a doctor. After helping direct the music for a play his freshman year, however, Kang’s love of music started to take over. His schedule went from one music class to two to three. “As I proceeded through college, I realized that music was becoming the only thing I wanted to do.”

When graduation rolled around, Kang abandoned his medical school aspirations and went to New York to try and make it as a musician. Five years later, he is hard at work on a number of fronts—directing shows, performing, teaching, and taking on a handful of odd jobs to help pay the bills. “I’m very blessed to be doing what I’m doing—I feel that way almost every day.”

I caught up with Kang in Midtown Manhattan to hear about his journey and learn about the ups and downs of life as a professional musician.